Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[shraeye]

This is secrety a "how-do-I-play-this-board" question, but I enjoy giving the background as well.

I recently had an idea to spice up my face-to-face dominion playing.  I only have Intrigue and Base for now, but I really like playing with the other sets on isotropic and wanted to introduce my friends to them.  So I printed out the mechanics of a kingdom only using expansions that I do not have, and tucked them into the sleeves of my current cards.  Huzzah, new cards!

So we played with transmute, duchess, fool's gold, native village, warehouse, spice merchant, mountebank, highway, counting house, apprentice. 

With 3 players, we played 3 rounds, and each won one apiece.  The fun thing is that every round each player was trying a new strategy, and we even had very little overlap between players.  The first round a strategy with fool's gold, warehouse, native village, and highway, using spice merchant for +buy won out (can't remember what he was playing against, but it's probably significant that nobody played mountebank this round).  The second round was won by a player that went for double mountebank (but no village), apprentice, and warehouse.  (this beat a similar strategy that used mountebank, warehouse, NV, and highway).  The third round was won by a player who relied on warehouse, apprentice, spice merchant, and a small amount of mountebanking.

So the questions are, what strategy do you prefer here?  What would you do if an opponent was trying to 3-pile with duchies, and duchesses (3rd pile being transmute or NV probably)?  No strategy using counting house or transmute ever won; I know these are considered weak cards, but is there a viable strategy using them?

[gman314]

I think that something using Counting House could be strong if your opponents went for Mountebank. With them giving you Coppers, you can have a bit of fun. But, since the only +Buy was Spice Merchant, this might not actually work. But you could just live without +Buy and see how things worked out.
I don't think that Transmute is really that great here, but the fact that there's curses flying around could help it.

[jsh357]

Spice Merchant -> Mountebank / Fool's Gold, I think.  Buy Duchies early too, as piles are bound to run. 

[Jorbles]

Spice Merchant -> Mountebank / Fool's Gold, I think.  Buy Duchies early too, as piles are bound to run.

This is strong in 2p, but if everyone else is rushing FGs you might want to instead go Mountebank/Warehouse/Counting House. This board looks very dependent on how your opponents are playing.

[ftl]

The key card here is Mountebank; any strategy you pick has to be determined in large part by how much mountebanking your opponents are doing.

If there's a lot of mountebanking going around, then Counting House/Warehouse will easily pick up provinces while everyone else is floundering in coppers. However, if there's not much mountebanking going around, then Warehouse/Counting House is pretty slow without +buy to pick up extra coppers and warehouses.

If there's no mountebanking going around, then the dominant strategy is probably Fools Gold+Spice Merchant. I wouldn't start with that though, because at the beginning you don't know whether there's mountebanking going on!

Mountebank+Warehouse+Money is sort of the safe bet which is bound to do acceptably. Throw around lots of curses and coppers to your opponents, warehouse to sift through and play mountebanks more often, and then let your opponents try to put together some tricky thing with Counting House or lots of spice merchants or whatever. I suspect it's unlikely to be truly optimal, but I bet it would win sometimes against opponents who got too fancy trying to deal with it.

I would not worry about a duchy rush with duchesses. If there's lots of mountebanking going around, then Counting House can pick up provinces and beat a duchy rush like that. If there isn't a lot of mountebanking going around, then you can get to provinces with a money-based strategy. The duchy/duchess rush is an option only if, mid-game, you suddenly see that everyone's screwed up their strategies and have decks which are neither here nor there. Something to keep an eye out for, but unlikely to be a dominant strategy. Keep an eye out on piles, but don't have this as your A-plan, I think.